The Random Ramblings Of A Chimp In Tech

The big tech story of the last week has to be the announcement by Microsoft that OneDrive storage is now going to be limited to 1TB of storage per user for those users subscribing to Office 365.

This is a U-turn on a previous announcement of late 2014 that by then end of 2015 OneDrive would be unlimited storage for all users.

The official justification for this turnaround is that Microsoft do not want to be in the business of mass storage backup of data, but the general feeling is that they have mis-judged the popularity of OneDrive, and what people are using it for.

It has been widely reported that there are a small number of users who have abused the unlimited storage option by uploading as much as 75TB of data to their OneDrive accounts, but could this really be described as ‘Abuse’ if Microsoft have advertised the storage as unlimited and someone has used a big chunk of it? In our opinion not, but then we don’t run Microsoft!

The 1TB offering that effectively costs around £70 as that is what you would need to pay for Office 365 to get it still remains quite competitive in the cloud storage world, so unless you have a real need for more then there’s not really any reason to move away from OneDrive.

If you need a lot more than 1TB then there are a few options but they are all fairly expensive with one exception – Amazon Cloud Drive, but there is one ‘gotcha’

It’s actually very easy to go over to Amazon.com and create an account there, even with a UK address, so if you really want a bucket load of Cloud Storage then this has to be worth considering.

This could be a great deal for anyone wishing to use the cloud to make backups or archives but as with all cloud storage we strongly suggest you encrypt anything of a sensitive nature before you upload it.